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Thursday, February 7, 2013

Adolescence 2.0: The People Collector

The shortest distance between new friends is a smile. ~Unknown

People fascinated Jean A. Noble, and downtown
Boston served an endless buffet of characters, a few delectable, others rotten,
and most just plain bland. She moved from busy streets to subway stations mostly
on the Red and detestable Green line to catch a few characters. They had to be
interesting because boring people made her want to snuggle in bed with a good
book to forget about and bury some bad day. Always hungry to meet new people,
she flashed teeth made straight from four years of gruesome braces that had
lacerated the soft flesh underneath her lips and temporarily rearranged her
face like she had work done on her cheeks. Those strings and bolts of metal
that cursed her four years of high school were most likely the reason she had
no high school sweet heart to name, but she knew that wasn’t entirely true.

But who wanted to think about their teenage
years now? Not her, especially since her smile had become her strongest ally.
With a flash of those straight white teeth, she picked away at defenses, melted
the ice meant to keep others far and shivering, and unearthed the good that sat
in the pit of each person’s soul. She turned on her mesmerizing glow, the
essence that brought lowered eyes to her face and caught strangers unaware in
its large, fluffy pillow for all, full of kindness, safety, and most important,
acceptance.

She owned invisible radar that went off when an
interesting person hovered close in the vicinity, and her favorite place to get
a mark was the subway. While others detested public transportation, Jean
abandoned and exchanged the loneliness of her ’99 Honda Civic for a monthly
Charlie card and never blinked. The subway provided ample ground for people
collecting, and with several new writing gigs in
her hands, a new apartment, and a cheerful goodbye to her home of Harford, Connecticut,
she wanted friends and maybe even a roommate if luck liked her enough.

She craved the kind of people who challenged her
thoughts and ideas, maybe ruffled her feathers a bit, showed her a new world,
or another way to live. Before moving back home to Hartford, she lived in
Harlem for a few years and befriended people with stories, dreams, failures,
triumphs, and suffering that painted her world in bold, refreshing colors that
glowed both day and night, never dead, but with hearts always beating. She
asked what she seldom voiced at loud: What’s your story? So, maybe it wasn’t
people she collected after all, but their stories.

Jean sipped at her scalding, large cup of coffee poisoned with three packs of brown sugar, hazelnut Coffee-Mate cream, and three
swirls of honey. The sweetness danced on her taste buds and kept her alert. She
scanned Park Street station as she waited for the train headed for Copley. A
friend she recently made at the office was over there, and Jean was twenty
minutes late for their shopping date. She blamed it on the Green line. Three
times already she tried to board a train she thought would stop but roared past
her and blasted cold air at face, shaking her body.

Instances
like these dragged the inner schizophrenic out of her as she mumbled out loud
her disgust and paced back and forth with her head stretching to spot the next
train. She made several eye contacts with like-minded individuals, all of them
victims of the Green line’s love for wasting people’s time. And yet, it provided
great opportunity for conversation. However, all Jean managed was the occasional “Can’t believe this,” and
eye-rolls from middle-aged mothers and other everyday folk consumed in their
own business.

People collecting came with its risks of course,
and Jean found the worst to be rejection while meeting a psycho trailed at
third place. The second was a desperate soul that clung closer than a
hitchhiker seed on a sock. She received rejection like a blow to the face, but
shrugged it off later because not everyone could be a friend or live a story.
Her aura attracted the strange, unique, and the lone wolves that flirted with the
fringe. She brushed away the duds in her casual, but cutthroat manner and
continued to fish.

Her motives were solely friendship. Sure, love
would be great but at twenty-four she was love’s greatest skeptic. Two
relationships broken by exes claiming she cared too little led to the
self-diagnosis that she was too selfish to devote the effort needed in loving
someone. Romance exhausted Jean yet she still yearned for it. Loneliness
slapped her across the face when those happy-go-lucky, PDA whoring couples
rubbed their good fortune in her face. They flaunted the shiny medal of
superiority their love awarded them and exposed her supposed deficiency. Give
me an effing break! Jean would think. But, no matter. Life taught her that
friendship ranked far higher than romance. She credited herself for several
attempts after the break-ups, but a process repeated itself too many times,
so she stopped. Become friends, confess love, get rejected, get hurt, move on,
and move on fast. Always in a hurry, she lived like today was her last day.
Even her words spilled out her mouth and fell on top of each other in a mad
dash to get out unless she checked herself and relaxed into the comfortable,
slow pace of a space cadet. She put on that chill suit pretty nicely.

There! Jean spotted an individual who sent the
alarms in her head ringing and clamoring for her to make a move. Everyone had a
story but not everyone knew it. The young Asian woman that stood at medium
height and possessed a lean built knew her story. A crown of reddish brown hair
cropped close above her ears sat on her head, showing off the six, no seven
piercings on her right ear. The young woman glanced at her men’s size Omega
style watch, and Jean caught the tattoo of a blue bird in the inside of her
wrist. Her eyes went to the full lips in a faux nude against a pale face and
eyes with boredom and tiredness floating inside them. The young woman exuded
confidence, coolness, and a tad of sadness mixed with loneliness. Something had
happened to her. She stood unapproachable. They were the most difficult, but
often also the most interesting.

The green train approached and stopped, so Jean
made sure to get into the same car as the young woman. People crowded the
train, unwilling to wait another minute for the next. She casually stood beside Blue Bird and
examined her oversized, black shirt of a woman’s face in white. A sky-blue blazer was slung over her arm. Jean counted. One. Two. Three.

“I like your shirt,” she said and smiled. “It’s
pretty cool.” She turned on the light and hit the young woman with that aura of
loveliness, flowers, and full-on acceptance and approval.

Blue Bird raised her eyes in surprise that
anyone would talk to her, but after a few seconds she chuckled and smiled. “Oh
uh, thanks. My ex got it for me when we were uh...in Italy.” Her voice and eyes
betrayed the sadness she wanted to mask.

"It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live." - Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

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